Word: planetsized
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5 Digable Planets Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) (Pendulum). Combining upscale jazz and proletarian hip hop, Digable Planets has brought two sides of the black experience together, uniting buppies and b-boys from Howard University to Howard Beach.
Most people don't worry much about such distinctions. With planets, however, it's different--as Tyson discovered. How do you resolve the problem he created? One idea would be to arbitrarily set the lower limit for a planet at about 2,000 km (1,250 miles) in diameter, which...
Yet another idea, favored by Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., would open the door even wider. By his definition, any object massive enough for gravity to squeeze into a spherical shape is a planet--unless the object orbits a bigger planet, of course. Otherwise, dozens...
The roundness rule would add lots of planets to the solar system in one fell swoop: not just Sedna, Quaoar and 2003 UB313 but also two more icy worlds spotted by Brown and Trujillo--2004 DW, a little bigger than Quaoar, and 2003 EL61, probably about seven-tenths the size...
Tyson, ever the iconoclast, thinks the word planet should be retired entirely, not just stripped from Pluto. "You tell me something's a planet," he says, "then I have to ask you 20 more questions to figure out what it actually is." As an educator as well as a scientist...